Trading is halted on New York Stock Exchange by technical glitch

Officials say investors are unable to buy or sell securities at this time.

Other exchanges remained operational, meaning that investors could still trade, just not on the NYSE.

“There is no indication that malicious actors were involved”, Earnest said.

But the Federal Bureau of Investigation said that issue was probably caused by a surge in readers looking for information about the NYSE breakdown. The exchange did say, however, its trouble was not due to a cyber breach.

“Only 15 to 20 percent of global stock exchange trading happens on the NYSE these days”, he said. The Hang Seng Index has dropped in morning trading following more big losses on mainland markets.

The Securities and Exchange Commission said it was monitoring the situation. “You have so many competing exchanges”.

It had already been a turbulent day for trading around the globe.

In Europe, however, where talks continued on Greece’s debt problems, markets traded higher.

Stock trading continued on other exchanges and “dark pools”, with the Dow down 1.3 per cent by noon at 17,548.95. The Dow was down 175 points (about 1%) around the time of the halt. Hong Kong’s main stock index plummeted as much as 8.5 percent on Wednesday as a sell-off in mainland Chinese shares accelerated despite new measures… The Nasdaq was down 88 points, or 1.8 percent, at 4,909.76. There is redundancy in the stock exchange system and stocks can continuously be traded fluidly.

The exchange, which has a market capitalisation of about $20trn, cancelled all open orders during the computer malfunction.

Mostowfi lauded the NYSE’s decision to shut trading down when they realized they had a technical problem. In 2013, trading in options in Chicago was halted due to an outage caused by software problems.

NYSE’s glitch came on the same day that computer problems led United Airlines to ground all its flights for about two hours and the home page of the Wall Street Journal’s website temporarily went down.

The exchange made the statement in a tweet on its official Twitter account.

“It started around 11:30 this morning, and last for over three hours”. But it has a separate benefit Wednesday – it allows investors to step over the fallen NYSE and keep trading. The Nasdaq and other exchanges are unaffected by the outage.